The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring Purpose This document describes how to monitor Windows machines with Nagios XI using WMI. Target Audience This document is intended for use by Nagios XI Administrators. Overview WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) allows for agentless monitoring of Windows machines. Nagios XI supports WMI monitoring, which provides admins with a simple method of monitoring their Windows servers and workstations without having to install or configure agents. XI Server Requirements Before you can monitor Windows machines using WMI, you must install the WMI client on the Nagios XI server. For instructions on doing this, read the following document on the Nagios Library (http://library.nagios.com ): • Installing The WMI Client For XI Page 1 Revision 1.0 – December, 2011 Nagios XI – Monitoring Windows Using WMI Nagios Enterprises, LLC US: 1-888-NAGIOS-1 Web: www.nagios.com P.O. Box 8154 Saint Paul, MN 55108 USA Int'l: +1 651-204-9102 Email: [email protected]Fax: +1 651-204-9103
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The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Purpose
This document describes how to monitor Windows machines with Nagios XI using WMI.
Target Audience
This document is intended for use by Nagios XI Administrators.
Overview
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) allows for agentless monitoring of Windows machines.
Nagios XI supports WMI monitoring, which provides admins with a simple method of monitoring their Windows servers and workstations without having to install or configure agents.
XI Server Requirements
Before you can monitor Windows machines using WMI, you must install the WMI client on the Nagios XI server. For instructions on doing this, read the following document on the Nagios Library (http://library.nagios.com):
WMI configuration described in this article are as follows:
✔ WMI service running✔ WMI user account✔ firewall rules
WMI Service
First, verify the correct WMI service is running
Click start, run, type “services.msc”
Start > run > services.msc
Before you can monitor Windows machines using WMI, you must ensure that the Windows Management Instrumentation service is running. You can configure and start the service in the Computer Management console under the Services section.
Next, configure a WMI user account on the local machine. We'll create a new user account called “wmiagent” with a password “wmiagent” as an example.
From the command prompt:
net user wmiagent wmiagent /add
Adding WMI permissions
The following steps outline how to add only the permissions needed to a limited limited Windows user account. You can add the user to be a member of the local administrators group instead however.
Note: if you wish to monitor multiple computers across the domain, instead add the user to be a member of the “domain administrators” group.
Adding remote activation privilege to Windows DCOM
Next, we need to give our newly created user access to DCOM on the localhost. In order to do this, open component services.
The following section describes firewall and DCOM port configuration. By default DCOM communicates with the client on a random port, so in order to write firewall rules, specifying a port range is also described.
Add a port range for COM services. In our example we selected range from 5000-5020. depending on your environment you may want to choose a different range
Allow the port range through the windows firewall. This command will open ports from 5000-5020 to match the COM Internet Services Range.
Click start > run > cmd
“FOR /L %I IN (5000,1,5020) DO netsh firewall add portopening TCP %I "COM"%I”
WMI requires a valid username and password on the target system.
This document will show how to configure Windows server 2008. The defined steps apply to previous version of Windows as well although locations of snap-ins may be different.
Windows XP
If you are running a firewall on the Windows machine, you must ensure that the Nagios server can contact the WMI service. To do this, you must open TCP Port 135 on the Windows firewall.
Installing The WMI Wizard
To get started using Nagios XI to monitor Windows machine with WMI, you need to install the Windows WMI monitoring wizard. The WMI monitoring wizard may be downloaded from the following link: